Wyrd Sisters

After a few minutes Granny's front door opened. This was an event in its own right; like most Ramtoppers Granny lived her life via the back door. There were only three times in your life when it was proper to come through the front door, and you were carried every time.

It opened with considerable difficulty, in a series of painful jerks and thumps. A few flakes of paint fell on to the snowdrift in front of the door, which sagged inward. Finally, when it was about halfway open, the door wedged.

Granny sidled awkwardly through the gap and out on to the hitherto undisturbed snow.

She had put her pointed hat on, and the long black cloak which she wore when she wanted anyone who saw her to be absolutely clear that she was a witch.

There was an elderly kitchen chair half buried in snow. In summer it was a handy place to sit and do whatever hand chores were necessary, while keeping one eye on the track. Granny hauled it out, brushed the snow off the seat, and sat down firmly with her knees apart and her arms folded defiantly. She stuck out her chin.

The sun was well up but the light on this Hogswatchday was still pink and slanting. It glowed on the great cloud of steam that hung over the assembled creatures. They hadn't moved, although every now and again one of them would stamp a hoof or scratch itself.

Granny looked up at a flicker of movement. She hadn't noticed before, but every tree around her garden was so heavy with birds that it looked as though a strange brown and black spring had come early.

Occupying the patch where the herbs grew in summer were the wolves, sitting or lolling with their tongues hanging out. A contingent of bears was crouched behind them, with a platoon of deer beside them. Occupying the metterforical stalls was a rabble of rabbits, weasels, vermine, badgers, foxes and miscellaneous creatures who, despite the fact that they live their entire lives in a bloody atmosphere of hunter and hunted, killing or being killed by claw, talon and tooth, are generally referred to as woodland folk.

They rested together on the snow, their normal culinary relationships entirely forgotten, trying to outstare her.

Two things were immediately apparent to Granny. One was that this seemed to represent a pretty accurate cross-section of the forest life.

The other she couldn't help saying aloud.

'I don't know what this spell is,' she said. 'But I'll tell you this for nothing – when it wears off, some of you little buggers had better get moving.'

None of them stirred. There was no sound except for an elderly badger relieving itself with an embarrassed expression.

'Look,' said Granny. 'What can I do about it? It's no good you coming to me. He's the new lord. This is his kingdom. I can't go meddling. It's not right to go meddling, on account of I can't interfere with people ruling. It has to sort itself out, good or bad. Fundamental rule of magic, is that. You can't go round ruling people with spells, because you'd have to use more and more spells all the time.' She sat back, grateful that long-standing tradition didn't allow the Crafty and the Wise to rule. She remembered what it had felt like to wear the crown, even for a few seconds.

No, things like crowns had a troublesome effect on clever folk; it was best to leave all the reigning to the kind of people whose eyebrows met in the middle when they tried to think. In a funny sort of way, they were much better at it.

She added, 'People have to sort it out for themselves. Well-known fact.'

She felt that one of the larger stags was giving her a particularly doubting look.

'Yes, well, so he killed the old king,' she conceded. That's nature's way, ain't it? Your lot know all about this. Survival of the wossname. You wouldn't know what an heir was, unless you thought it was a sort of rabbit.'

She drummed her fingers on her knees.

'Anyway, the old king wasn't much of a friend to you, was he? All that hunting, and such.'

Three hundred pairs of dark eyes bored in at her.

'It's no good you all looking at me,' she tried. 'I can't go around mucking about with kings just because you don't like them. Where would it all end? It's not as if he's done me any harm.'

She tried to avoid the gaze of a particularly cross-eyed stoat.

'All right, so it's selfish,' she said. 'That's what bein' a witch is all about. Good day to you.'

She stamped inside, and tried to slam the door. It stuck once or twice, which rather spoiled the effect.

Once inside she drew the curtains and sat down in the rocking chair and rocked fiercely.

'That's the whole point,' she said. 'I can't go around meddling. That's the whole point.'

The lattys lurched slowly over the rutted roads, towards yet another little city whose name the company couldn't quite remember and would instantly forget. The winter sun hung low over the damp, misty cabbage fields of the Sto Plains, and the foggy silence magnified the creaking of the wheels.

Hwel sat with his stubby legs dangling over the backboard of the last latty.

He'd done his best. Vitoller had left the education of Tomjon in his hands; 'You're better at all that business,' he'd said, adding with his usual tact, 'Besides, you're more his height.'

But it wasn't working.

'Apple,' he repeated, waving the fruit in the air.

Tomjon grinned at him. He was nearly three years old, and hadn't said a word anyone could understand. Hwel was harbouring dark suspicions about the witches.

'But he seems bright enough,' said Mrs Vitoller, who was travelling inside the latty and darning the chain mail. 'He knows what things are. He does what he's told. I just wish you'd speak,' she said softly, patting the boy on the cheek.

Hwel gave the apple to Tomjon, who accepted it gravely.

'I reckon them witches did you a bad turn, missus,' said the dwarf. 'You know. Changelings and whatnot. There used to be a lot of that sort of thing. My great-great-grandmother said it was done to us, once. The fairies swapped a human and a dwarf. We never realised until he started banging his head on things, they say—'

'They say this fruit be like unto the world

So sweet. Or like, say I, the heart of man

So red without and yet within, unclue'd,

We find the worm, the rot, the flaw.

However glows his bloom the bite

Proves many a man be rotten at the core.'

The two of them swivelled around to stare at Tomjon, who nodded to them and proceeded to eat the apple.

'That was the Worm speech from The Tyrant,' whispered Hwel. His normal grasp of the language temporarily deserted him. 'Bloody hell,' he said.

'But he sounded just like—'

'I'm going to get Vitoller,' said Hwel, and dropped off the tailboard and ran through the frozen puddles to the front of die convoy, where the actor-manager was whistling tunelessly and, yes, strolling.

'What ho, b'zugda-hiara[8],' he said cheerfully.

'You've got to come at once! He's talking!'

Talking?'

Hwel jumped up and down. 'He's quoting!' he shouted. 'You've got to come! He sounds just like—'

'Me?' said Vitoller, a few minutes later, after they had pulled the lattys into a grove of leafless trees by the roadside. 'Do I sound like that?'

'Yes,' chorused the company.

Young Willikins, who specialised in female roles, prodded Tomjon gently as he stood on an upturned barrel in the middle of the clearing.

'Here, boy, do you know my speech from Please Yourself!' he said.

Tomjon nodded. ' “He is not dead, I say, who lies beneath the stone. For if Death could but hear—” '

They listened in awed silence as the endless mists rolled across the dripping fields and the red ball of the sun floated down the sky. When the boy had finished hot tears were streaming down Hwel's face.

'By all the gods,' he said, when Tomjon had finished, 'I must have been on damn good form when I wrote that.' He blew his nose noisily.

'Do I sound like that?' said Willikins, his face pale.

Vitoller patted him gently on the shoulder.

'If you sounded like that, my bonny,' he said, 'you wouldn't be standing arse-deep in slush in the middle of these forsaken fields, with nothing but liberated cabbage for thy tea.'

He clapped his hands.

'No more, no more,' he said, his breath making puffs of steam in the freezing air. 'Backs to it, everybody. We must be outside the walls of Sto Lat by sunset.'

As the grumbling actors awoke from the spell and wandered back to the shafts of the lattys Vitoller beckoned to the dwarf and put his arm around his shoulders, or rather around the top of his head.

'Well?' he said. 'You people know all about magic, or so it is said. What do you make of it?'

'He spends all his time around the stage, master. It's only natural that he should pick things up,' said Hwel vaguely.

Vitoller leaned down.

'Do you believe that?'

'I believe I heard a voice that took my doggerel and shaped it and fired it back through my ears and straight into my heart,' said Hwel simply. 'I believe I heard a voice that got behind the crude shape of the words and said the things I had meant them to say, but had not the skill to achieve. Who knows where such things come from?'

He stared impassively into Vitoller's red face. 'He may have inherited it from his father,' he said.

'But-'

'And who knows what witches may achieve?' said the dwarf.

Vitoller felt his wife's hand pushed into his. As he stood up, bewildered and angry, she kissed him on the back of the neck.

'Don't torture yourself,' she said. 'Isn't it all for the best? Your son has declaimed his first word.'

Spring came, and ex-King Verence still wasn't taking being dead lying down. He prowled the castle relentlessly, seeking for a way in which its ancient stones would release their grip on him.

He was also trying to keep out of the way of the other ghosts.

Champot was all right, if a bit tiresome. But Verence had backed away at the first sight of the Twins, toddling hand in hand along the midnight corridors, their tiny ghosts a memorial to a deed darker even than the usual run of regicidal unpleasantness.

And then there was the Troglodyte Wanderer, a rather faded monkeyman in a furry loincloth who apparently happened to haunt the castle merely because it had been built on his burial mound. For no obvious reason a chariot with a screaming woman in it occasionally rumbled through the laundry room. As for the kitchen . . .

One day he'd given in, despite everything old Champot had said, and had followed the smells of cooking into the big, hot, high domed cavern that served the castle as kitchen and abattoir. Funny thing, that. He'd never been down there since his childhood. Somehow kings and kitchens didn't go well together.

It was full of ghosts.

But they weren't human. They weren't even proto-human.

They were stags. They were bullocks. They were rabbits, and pheasants, and partridges, and sheep, and pigs. There were even some round blobby things that looked unpleasantly like the ghosts of oysters. They were packed so tightly that in fact they merged and mingled, turning the kitchen into a silent, jostling nightmare of teeth and fur and horns, half-seen and misty. Several noticed him, and there was a weird blarting of noises that sounded far-off, tinny and unpleasantly out of register. Through them all the cook and his assistants wandered quite unconcernedly, making vegetarian sausages.

Verence had stared for half a minute and then fled, wishing that he still had a real stomach so that he could stick his fingers down his throat for forty years and bring up everything he'd eaten.

He'd sought solace in the stables, where his beloved hunting dogs had whined and scratched at the door and had generally been very ill-at-ease at his sensed but unseen presence.